NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-03-2025 11AM EST

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington on Korva Coleman, President Trump's envoys met Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday in Moscow. They discussed a peace plan to end Russia's war in Ukraine. The plant had been edited with input from Ukrainian and European diplomats. The Kremlin says Putin accepted some proposals and rejected others, but Moscow insists it's still ready to talk. NATO officials are meeting in Brussels. The foreign minister of Estonia, Margas Sokna, says Putin does not want peace. What we see is that Putin has not changed any goals. He's pushing more aggressively on the battlefield.

It's pretty obvious that he doesn't want to have any kind of peace. Putin's talks with the U.S. envoys did not achieve any breakthrough. A survey of U.S. diplomats finds that morale at the State Department is extremely low. NPR's Michelle Kellerman reports this comes as President Trump has spent nearly a year in the White House. The president of the American Foreign Service Association, John Dinkle, calls it a dire situation. 98% of the Foreign Service officers surveyed reported low morale, and 86% said the Trump administration's changes have affected their ability

to advance U.S. diplomatic priorities. The diplomatic core of the United States feels the effects of what has been undertaken in the form of managing their workplace to the ground. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he's been streamlining what he calls a bloated bureaucracy, He dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and then laid off another 1,300 State Department employees in July. Michelle Kellerman, NPR News, the State Department. The Department of Homeland Security says it has launched an immigration operation in New Orleans today.

The Trump administration says it is targeting violent criminals. The FBI says it is now working with the Louisiana State Police on an operation. This is to stop assaults on federal law enforcement officers. Glitches in the middle of video calls may be more than annoying. Some new experiments show that technical hiccups may undermine your success in everything from job interviews to court hearings. NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce explains. A team of researchers did experiments by simulating some common video call scenarios, like health consultations or sales pitches, to see how people in glitch-free video calls are perceived compared to people whose videos have brief free freezes,

or audio echoes. The results in the journal Nature show that glitches when a person was speaking resulted in that person being perceived as less likable or trustworthy. The researchers also studied some real-world data from parole hearings that were conducted over video and found that technical glitches significantly reduced the chances that someone would get parole. Dell Greenfield Boyce, NPR News. On Wall Street, the Dow was up 220 points. This is NPR. President Trump has officially introduced his Trump account program for children. Kids born from January 2025 through December 2028 are eligible. The government will contribute $1,000 into individual accounts for children.

Reporter Stacey Vanek-Smith is with Bloomberg's Business Week. It really does function a little bit like a retirement account where you can make tax-free contributions, the child's family, even an employer can make contributions into these accounts. And then once the child turns out of the child. 18, they can start withdrawing these accounts for things like a down payment on a house or education, things like that. Stacey Vanek-Smith reporting. A new study finds a state rule in California protecting outdoor workers from heat has been effective. NPR's Alejandra Barundo reports the rule has likely prevented the heat deaths of dozens of workers in California every

year. Only a handful of states in the country have any rules protecting workers from heat. But California has had one for outdoor workers since 2005. The state upped enforcement and closed loopholes for the rule in 2010 and 2015. And according to a new study in the journal health policy, it appears to be working. Lead author Adam Dean is at George Washington University. That means that California's heat standard likely prevents approximately 34 worker deaths per year compared to what we see in neighboring states without standards. Dean says that's important information for the federal occupational safety and health administration

to know. OSHA proposed a national heat rule in 2024 and is considering it now. Alejandro Burunda, NPR News. And you're listening to NPR News from Washington. Listen to this podcast sponsor-free on Amazon Music with a prime membership or any podcast app by subscribing to NPR NewsNowplus at plus.npr.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.